A Citizen Is Obliged To Listen
When a refugee flees to another country and claims asylum, she is, in effect, petitioning the state to listen to her story.
Ankita Chakraborty
Longreads
February 2019
https://longreads.com/2019/02/26/a-citizen-is-obliged-to-listen/
When a refugee flees to another country and claims asylum, she is, in effect, petitioning the state to listen to her story. The state provides the refugee with lawyers, asylum officers and immigration judges who, each in their own capacity, have to just listen. According to the 1967 Protocol of the Refugee Convention, the refugee has every right to tell her story to the state and the state is legally bound to listen to it. Listening to a story might also expose the state to the possibility of a change of mind and even a favorable decision for the refugee. It is for this reason, in a clever evasion of legal responsibility, that countries like France, Italy and the United Kingdom now surveil the seas, intercepting migrant boats en route and returning them to where they came from before they’ve even arrived; or why Donald Trump last December put a ban on asylum seekers from entering the country and has since then been keeping them detained in Mexico; or why he has recently attempted to ban Central American children from applying as refugees when they are already in the U.S., advising them to instead apply from where they live, through a process that does not exist. The point is to distance refugees from their legally-bound listeners, protecting the listeners from being moved by those stories. […]
In the world’s “safe” countries, there is still no stigma against deportation. When talking about refugees, we have been so focused on the number of them moving in, that it is appalling how little we talk about who is being sent back. […] this is not a world of citizens beleaguered by a tide of refugees, but a world of refugees trapped in the age of the citizen.